What did not work

Browse the interwebs for Job Postings

Submit resume and cover letters

Wait

I am not sure why companies even bother posting jobs on their web sites! Only one out of many got in touch with me later. I am not the only one with this experience. (Perhaps I just wasn’t qualified for 99% of the jobs I applied for… )

What did work!

Create a Genuine and SPIFFY Github Profile

I found my github profile page to more important than my resume. I am not exaggerating. If you are looking for a developer position today, your resume is secondary. Start curating your github page today. My Github profile started many many more real conversations with potential employers. (In fact Google called me out of the blue saying “hey we noticed you have been committing a lot of Python code, do you want to chat?”. I did not get the job in the end, but did get a couple of real conversations in interviews.)

Ways you can create a profile worth looking at:

Make an open source contribution or two. Even just filling pull requests with your code is good.

Clone some interesting Repos and read the source. Open Source projects give us access to the minds of some of the top coders in the world. We should read open source projects like we read fine works of William Shakespeare. Read open source projects like fine novels. One I highly recommend is Redis

Publish your hobby projects. Even if they are just stubs. Here are some I did recently:

Implement jsonapi.org specification in your favorite language…

create working example using a new framework like Angular

Heroku-like Deploy of Wordpress with Git

README Driven Development (RDD)

Too busy to write full working code for you Github profile… try README Driven Development!

Just create detailed readme of your idea with complete install steps and documentation. Show example of how the user will use your code to solve a problem. The community might just start a discussion… my Improvements for Git got to #5 on hackernews.

Clear READMEs can quickly show off an innovative solution to a complex problem. They also make a great spec for when you do start coding.

Here are examples of a couple of my README Driven Development projects: